Creating New Ventures: A review and research agenda

Creating new ventures is one of the most central topics to entrepreneurship and is a critical step from which many theories of management, organizational behavior, and strategic management build. Therefore, this review and proposed research agenda is not only relevant to entrepreneurship scholars but also other management scholars who wish to challenge some of the implicit assumptions of their current streams of research and extend the boundaries of their current theories to earlier in the organization’s life. Given that the last systematic review of the topic was published 16 years ago, and that the topic has evolved rapidly over this time, an overview and research outlook are long overdue. From our review, we inductively generated ten sub-topics: (1) Lead founder, (2) Founding team, (3) Social relationships, (4) Cognitions, (5) Emergent organizing, (6) New venture strategy, (7) Organizational emergence, (8) New venture legitimacy, (9) Founder exit, and (10) Entrepreneurial environment. These sub-topics are then organized into three major stages of the entrepreneurial process—co-creating, organizing, and performing. Together, the framework provides a cohesive story of the past and a road map for future research on creating new ventures, focusing on the links connecting these sub-topics

The Church vs the Mall: What Happens When Religion Faces Increased Secular Competition?

Recently economists have begun to consider the causes and consequences of religious participation. An unanswered question in this literature is the effect upon individuals of changes in the opportunity cost of religious participation. In this paper we identify a policy-driven change in the opportunity cost of religious participation based on state laws that prohibit retail activity on Sunday, known as %u201Cblue laws.%u201D Many states have repealed these laws in recent years, raising the opportunity cost of religious participation. We construct a model which predicts, under fairly general conditions, that allowing retail activity on Sundays will lower attendance levels but may increase or decrease religious donations. We then use a variety of datasets to show that when a state repeals its blue laws religious attendance falls, and that church donations and spending fall as well. These results do not seem to be driven by declines in religiosity prior to the law change, nor do we see comparable declines in membership or giving to nonreligious organizations after a state repeals its laws. We then assess the effects of changes in these laws on drinking and drug use behavior in the NLSY. We find that repealing blue laws leads to an increase in drinking and drug use, and that this increase is found only among the initially religious individuals who were affected by the blue laws. The effect is economically significant; for example, the gap in heavy drinking between religious and non religious individuals falls by about half after the laws are repealed.

Unemployment Insurance and Precautionary Saving

We consider both theoretically and empirically the effect of unemployment insurance (UI) on precautionary savings behavior. Simulations of a stochastic life cycle model suggest that increasing the generosity of UI will substantially lower the asset holdings of the median worker, and that this effect will both rise with unemployment risk and fall with worker age. We test these implications by matching data on potential UI replacement rates to asset holdings in the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). Our empirical results are quite consistent with the predictions of the model. We find that raising the replacement rate for UI by 10 percentage points lowers financial asset holdings by 1.4 to 5.6%, so that UI crowds out up to one-half of private savings for the typical unemployment spell. We also find that this effect is stronger for those facing higher unemployment risk and weaker for older workers.

Induced gamma band responses predict recognition delays during object identification

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Faith-Based Charity and Crowd Out during the Great Depression

Interest in religious organizations as providers of social services has increased dramatically in recent years. Churches in the U.S. were a crucial provider of social services through the early part of the twentieth century, but their role shrank dramatically with the expansion in government spending under the New Deal. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which the New Deal crowded out church charitable spending in the 1930s. We do so using a new nationwide data set of charitable spending for six large Christian denominations, matched to data on local New Deal spending. We instrument for New Deal spending using measures of the political strength of a state's congressional delegation, and confirm our findings using a different instrument based on institutional constraints on state relief spending. With both instruments we find that higher government spending leads to lower church charitable activity. Crowd-out was small as a share of total New Deal spending (3%), but large as a share of church spending: our estimates suggest that church spending fell by 30% in response to the New Deal, and that government relief spending can explain virtually all of the decline in charitable church activity observed between 1933 and 1939.

Coding of visual object features and feature conjunctions in the human brain

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Self-noise produced by an airfoil with nonflat plate trailing-edge serrations

This paper represents the results of an experimental study aimed at reducing the airfoil self-noise by the trailing edge serration of four different sawtooth geometries (defined in the serration angle and length). These serrations have a common feature: all of the sawtooth patterns are cut directly into the trailing edge of a realistic airfoil. This configuration offers better structural strength and integrity. For the sawtooth trailing edges investigated here, the radiation of the extraneous vortex shedding noise in a narrowband frequency due to the partial bluntness at the serration roots is unavoidable. However, this narrowband component tends to be less significant provided that the serration angle is large and the serration length is moderate. Sound power was measured, and some of the sawtooth geometries have been shown to afford significant boundary-layer instability tonal noise and moderate turbulent broadband noise reductions across a fairly large velocity range. This paper demonstrates that a nonflat plate serrated trailing edge can also be effective in the self-noise reduction. Some experimental results are also presented in order to explain the self-noise mechanisms.This work is partly supported by the Brunel Research Initiative and Enterprise fun

Positive Measure Spectrum for Schroedinger Operators with Periodic Magnetic Fields

We study Schroedinger operators with periodic magnetic field in Euclidean 2-space, in the case of irrational magnetic flux. Positive measure Cantor spectrum is generically expected in the presence of an electric potential. We show that, even without electric potential, the spectrum has positive measure if the magnetic field is a perturbation of a constant one.Comment: 17 page